We discussed in previous blogs the need for data protection for Kubernetes and what’s different about CloudCasa.  CloudCasa was designed to address the gap in data protection and disaster recovery that exists in all the leading Kubernetes distributions and managed cloud services. Further, another pain point that CloudCasa addresses is that your cloud-based applications may well be hybrid and multi-cloud applications that use both container-based storage and serverless databases. This is not unlike your on-premises applications that run in different server, virtualization, and storage infrastructures. CloudCasa was designed to support hybrid, distributed, multi-cluster, and multi-cloud environments.

One of our early beta users challenged us on why CloudCasa was needed when there is already backup for a Kubernetes cluster available in Azure. Indeed, Azure’s best practices guide for storage and backups in Azure Kubernetes Service states: Back up your data using an appropriate tool for your storage type, such as Velero or Azure Backup. 

The Azure Backup service is a file and VM-level backup that is not container or cluster aware, so it is not suitable for recovering cluster configuration and application state. While Azure Backup does support all of Azure’s databases, CloudCasa will also support these and the serverless databases of other cloud services.

Velero is an open source, CLI-based tool that needs infrastructure to be provisioned and supported for it. Then you need to manually setup and configure it for each cluster you have, including the backup storage target for each cluster.

Top 10 Reasons for Using CloudCasa instead of Velero

Since CloudCasa actually leverages Velero for some of its data protection capabilities, let’s go through the major additions we have added, based on our 25+ years of experience in the data protection market.

1. Backup as a Service. With CloudCasa, there is no need to build a backup infrastructure or maintain Velero installations with fast evolving updates. We host and manage your backups and snapshots with a rich service so complete with capabilities that even your IT Operations team would use it. Set it and forget it and you’ll never need to hear this:

2. Ransomware Protection: CloudCasa provides an air-gap for your backup data to protect it from a hacker or a ransomware attack. Don’t end up with all your eggs in one basket, if your cloud account gets compromised or your application is misconfigured.

3. Multi-Cluster Management: Multi-cluster, hybrid, and multi-cloud management, with cluster migration. The challenge of manually dealing with Velero on a dozen clusters is very different from dealing with Velero on one cluster.

4. Cloud Database Protection: CloudCasa will support snapshotting serverless databases to ensure application consistent backups of data outside of Kubernetes. Serverless databases account for a large portion of persistent data for applications running on Kubernetes.

5. Free Snapshots and Backup Storage Promotion: Storage for your cluster resource data is included in the Free Service Tier. We configure the storage leaving no room for misconfiguration of bucket permissions that can expose your data. And we are adding support for even more regions and cloud providers.

6. Secure Backups: Data is encrypted in flight and at rest by CloudCasa. Don’t leave security to chance and hope your Kubernetes backup owners are setting the right privileges. CloudCasa is also adding support for BYO keys as well, for both data in transit and data at rest.

7. Intuitive UI: Get ease of configuration and management from an intuitive GUI that guides you through initial setup of policy driven data protection for your clusters and namespaces. Within 10 clicks you’ll have your backup and restore policies and operations in place. And we all know

8. Cloud Provider Outage Protection:  CloudCasa protects against local and temporary outages of your cloud provider by allowing you to quickly restore in an alternate zone or region or to an alternate cloud provider. Each quarter based on customer demand, we’ll add support for even more regions and cloud providers.

9. Centralized Catalog and Reporting: You don’t have to pray and hope that you have a backup when you need it. From the CloudCasa console, you can quickly confirm you have recovery points available and monitor your backups on an ongoing basis, to be aware of how protected and compliant you are.

10. Backups are Monitored:  CloudCasa monitors backup success rates across customers, and our staff will debug your problems, and proactively inform you when you could do something to improve your success rates.

Why Try CloudCasa Now

Finally, CloudCasa is FREE forever at the level of service provided by the beta release, that includes unlimited worker nodes and clusters, and unlimited CSI snapshots, with 30 days retention.  Looking forward, our premium level of service in 1H2021 will support application consistent snapshots, backup of Persistent Volumes (PVs) and Serverless databases and more.

Catalogic is known for its copy data management and data protection products, including being a technology partner to IBM Storage, Pure Storage, HPE Storage, NetApp, and others. Our goal is to do all the hard work for you to backup and protect your multi-cloud, multi-cluster, cloud native databases and applications so you can realize the operational efficiency and speed of development advantages of containers and cloud native applications.

With CloudCasa, your users will get a lot more value-added features on top of Velero for your Kubernetes and cloud native data protection and disaster recovery. Try CloudCasa.io today and start realizing the benefits of our free and unique cloud-native data protection.N